Mother
by PolarisWhatever
Summary: Drabblistic kind of OS. Fleur does her best, and ultimately finds that it will never be enough.


I do realize that particular theme has probably been done and redone about a thousand and one times, but. It called to me. It offered me cookies. I'm still waiting for them, but you get the idea. It had to be done.

Disclaimer: I don't even own the bunny rabbit who's currently trying to eat my hair. And still no cookies. Life is indeed tough.

Hoping this will be remotely enjoyed. Feedback is always loved.

XXX

Fleur thinks the countryside might be a good idea. Less people, fresh air, not that it really can do any good to him, but at least there's plenty of space to roam around and it's easier to hide if a… problem arises. In truth, she's got no idea what she's doing. They don't tell about that kind of thing in the perfect mother's handbook. But she has to try, has to do something.

So she starts with cleaning the house and repainting the walls.

When she's sore and sweating, paint on her hands and elbows, splashed on her cheek, the radio playing a cheesy but upbeat love song in the background, she feels normalcy settling over her like a reassuring blanket. And well, the sun is still shining outside the window, though she can tell from the heavy clouds looming in the grey sky that it's going to rain soon – typical English spring, really – and the earth hasn't stopped its course. So life goes on. She can do this.

"Mom!"

And then he is there, her little angel, her little wonder in his yellow raincoat, the one who kept her going all these years, gave her a reason to stand again when the empty space on the other side of the bed and the extra-hours at work became almost too much to bear. She could draw him with her eyes closed, every line of his face, every shade of green and brown and that small flicker of gold in his eyes, the way his little brow furrows when he is concentrating, the way his smile blossoms and makes everything look brighter in the space of a second. She knows him better than anyone. How could she be afraid?

"Mom! John and Lucy Wainwright said they're going to build a tree house in the woods, and their parents even let them take blankets and stuff. Please, please, can I go?"

"Sorry, honey" She answers with a tight-lipped smile, "I need your help tidying everything up right now."

"But…" He looks up at her, surprised and almost hurt, his stare piercing and demanding to know why she'd denying him this when she has no real reason to, no real reason other than the familiar twisting in her gut. She wonders, does he know, can he tell, are his clear, innocent eyes saying that he's figured her out. Can he see that she's lying, again and again, little and inconsequential lies, but lies nonetheless.

"But you know what? After we're finished, we'll drive to the town and we'll get some ice cream and comic books. How does that sound?"

"Cool!" And just like this everything is forgotten, it's all flying over his pretty little head with the million little things that come and go like candy wrappers in a little boy's life.

She can do this.

I

From an external point of view, she muses, they must look like an ordinary family. A mother, clad in unglamorous but practical jerseys, leading her son by the hand through the supermarket's alleys, filling her basket with cheap, special-offer-of-the-week products, shaking her head with an exasperated sigh at the umpteenth plea for chocolate cookies or cereals-with-a-toy-inside-the-box. Well, admittedly, the mother is single and a little younger than she should be, but it is nothing eventual onlookers have not seen before.

"No, darling, I'm pretty sure we don't need ten boxes of Batman crackers." She berates him, her tennis shoes squeaking on the hideously orange linoleum, her fingers closing around his ice-cold wrist to drag him far from the offending item.

And none of them – the old lady buying sugar and oranges to make marmalade, the overweight employee who doesn't even try to hide his large yawn behind his hand, the young man with the glasses whose basket is full of ready-made food – notice the way her hand hovers above the garlic bread, uncertainty etching painfully in her eyes, before jerking away almost brutally.

They are ordinary.

II

One morning, she finds a dead bird on the doorstep, its tiny body torn off and bloody beyond recognition. She stares at it for long minutes, hugging herself – must be the cold, she should go fetch a jacket – before she musters the courage to get a broom and her dish gloves. Probably the neighbour's cat, she mumbles to herself as she buries it in the backyard, inexplicably feeling the need to find branches to make a small cross, like she did for her pets when she was a little girl. But she is a grown-up woman now, a mother, and she doesn't have time for things like this, so she just dumps fresh earth on the lifeless animal and stomps on it until even she is not able to tell that anything is different from before, that the small life ever existed at all. Nature is cruel, she tells herself, it's the cycle of life, it's always been this way and it'll always be. It's hardly anything to think about, she was never sentimental anyway. She doesn't care.

Except she does, and she's ashamed and frustrated when she feels her eyes sting with tears she won't let herself shed.

She gets back to the house, grabs her keys, drives to the supermarket and buys two pounds of red meat for dinner. And she cleans and paints and cooks until the dull routine of house chores almost makes her forget.

The week after, the neighbour knocks at the door to ask if she has seen his cat.

She can't help noticing how pale her baby boy is getting, no matter how much she feeds him, and the way his eyes look like they're almost glowing.

III

He's growing weaker.

She can lie to herself no longer, can't avoid noticing the way his hands shake sometimes, the translucent quality of his skin in the sunlight – she figures the daylight won't harm him since it didn't seem to do anything to Mitchell, but she still makes him wear a cap, long sleeves and sunscreen just in case – the starved look in his eyes.

God, those eyes. They seem to see through everything, the walls, her skin, her heart, and it is in these kind of moments that she can't help thinking that maybe he is not just her little boy anymore. But then she shrugs it off (like everything), because of course he is, because he has to be. It's her the problem, she's not strong enough, not smart enough, there's got to be a way around this and she's bound to find it sooner or later, because she's got no choice, because she won't let herself think otherwise.

So she tries everything, she cooks the meat less and less until it's almost raw, then completely so, she feeds him hot soup and fortifiers and everything she can think about. She forbids him to go out before dusk and makes him stay in bed for the major part of the day, she coddles him and watches after him like the proverbial cat watching the canary, except that in this case the one with the fangs isn't the one you'd expect.

She tries everything but the right thing.

She keeps pretending it's going to work someday and he keeps fading out, for lack of a better word, until he collapses on the kitchen floor one morning and starts trembling and trashing, moaning and crying like his heart is being ripped out of his chest. The old Fleur would panic and cry, but deep down she's been waiting for it all along. There is no room for hesitation anymore.

Her hand is steady when she grabs the knife.

IV

There are many things that could hurt him.

She knows the old myths, from the shows she used to watch on TV and the books she keeps borrowing from the library even though they make her sick to her stomach. She realizes most of it is probably bogus, men inventing legends to pass the time and scare themselves for entertainment while they didn't realize the subject of their fantasies were really selling bread at the market, passing by them in the streets, hiding in the house next door.

But how can she tell? How can she know what is true and what isn't, where the fiction starts to be more than fiction? After all, she didn't believe in… well she didn't believe anything like this could be real at all before. So how can she laugh even at the most seemingly preposterous stories, how can she shrug them off and declare them untrue? If she's learned something in this ordeal, it's that she doesn't know anything.

There is nobody to guide her hand, and sometimes how she hates him, the man who dropped her in this unknown world without so much as a word of explanation. But then without him there would be nobody to worry about either.

She throws away the cross she used to wear around her neck.

V

For the sake of her son, Fleur becomes a hunter and a butcher.

She buys live hens in the market, kittens and puppies in the pet store, never coming back to the same shop to avoid arising suspicion. She installs traps in the forest, catches birds and mice, anything that she can get her hands on. She closes her eyes to the blood, the frightened squeaks, the panic-filled eyes and learns how to bleed without killing, how to not waste a drop, how to keep them alive as long as possible until they've been drained to the last drop.

She almost never throws up anymore.

It seems to quell his thirst for a short time, but such a short time really, it's almost not even worth mentioning at all. Soon the raw hunger is back in his eyes, devouring his round face like a fire, clenching his sickly white hands into fists. So of course she has to do something, because he is her little demon, neither pure nor innocent but still her responsibility, her flesh and the blood of the other man in black, her burden but her darling all the same. Because she's a mother and though he doesn't have a heart anymore, hers is still beating and beating only for him, to her last breath and till the end of the world if it comes, ready to sacrifice anything and _anyone_, if it comes to that, so he will smile, even if the smile is red and twisted.

The rules are shifting, and now she's the one who has to wear long sleeves, and eat red meat at almost every meal.

VI

They're going to have to move away soon, she knows.

It's been too long, and even if she tells people again and again that he "has a condition", the way he doesn't grow up is starting to be too noticeable. The schoolteacher calls almost everyday, and the neighbour keeps casting her suspicious glances since she saw the bloody bandage on her wrist.

The city might be better anyway, more people, less gossip, crowds to hide into. She'll have to find a new job, but well, it's not like it's the first time anyway. She'll get him homeschooled this time, plan everything better, now she knows more, now she has experience. And even if one day she might have to tell people that she's his grandmother, it'll still be fine. It's the then that's scary, because then she'll be gone, and what will become of him?

In the depths of her heart, Fleur knows that this issue is really not an issue at all, and that it might happen much sooner than she used to think.

Nowadays, she doesn't even need the knife.


End file.
